Going by the AAA titles, game design
shares elements with film design. Having a fully voiced and acted
plotline is common these days. However, video games make for poor
films. Game series that get adapted to film are campy cult hits at
best, and a waste of everyone's time at worst.
Still, games adapted to film aren't an
entirely toxic concept; it just takes a little bit of lateral
thinking. Here are 5 films I feel could be interesting adaptations,
and a few that definitely shouldn't make a trip to Hollywood. (Note
that some titles I mention may be in production already. Just because
they exist doesn't mean they should.)
Take them to the silver
screen
Yakuza (2005, Sega)
Who would direct it?: Chan-wook
Park (Oldboy)
Yakuza has drama on two levels.
On one, there's the inter-personal relationships of ageing yakuza
members searching for peace and comfort. On another, there's Kazuma
Kiryu repeatedly ramming a barstool into some thug's face.
Adapted as an action movie, a gradual
swing between emotional torment and low budget, brutally
choreographed violence would be deliciously harrowing; a welcome
escape from the CGI and explosions that's the normal go-to for the
genre.
Luigi's Mansion (2002,
Nintendo)
Who would direct it?: Dean
DeBlois (How to Train Your Dragon, Mulan)
Feel-good summer blockbuster of the
year; one plumber who has long suffered in his brother's shadow,
plucks up the courage to be the driving force in his own life. A
decent animation studio is a must - the Mushroom Kingdom doesn't work
in real-life proportions,
evidenced many times.
Half the fun would be Luigi's
ghostbusting antics, the other half being a great art direction. Hey,
if Disney's Wreck-It Ralph makes a decent return at the box
office, and they retain the license to use Nintendo characters, this
may not end up being conjecture.
...I wish.
Driver: San Francisco (2011,
Ubisoft)
Who would direct it?: Scott
Sanders (Black Dynamite)
Driver:SF is a love letter to
the car chase genre, right down to bonus missions that reference
big-name films set in San Fran. However, a Scary Movie style
adaptation with endless references isn't going to cut it.
The plot of Driver:SF is campy,
simple and incidental (John Tanner is a cop chasing down criminal
mastermind Charles Jericho - even in his dreams), meaning a film
version can go all out in telling a self-parodying tale about comas,
fast cars, and rebellious police.
If they manage to retain the game's
mechanic of Tanner possessing other drivers, the chase sequences
could be unlike any other.
L.A. Noire (2011, Team
Bondie)
Who would direct it?: Michel
Hazanavicius (The Artist)
The Artist, though I didn't care
for it, proved an important point - the techniques of old can have
modern relevance. Gaming fans already know about this (what with all
the retro-style indie games out there), but here it means that
mimicking old film styles has more validity than just being a
gimmick.
L.A. Noire's 1940s setting
heavily reflects actual Film Noir (right down to the use of
flashback), but Film Noir is traditionally done in the 'past tense'
(with the protagonist as a narrator), while L.A. Noire is very
much 'present tense'. Doing the adaptation in a true-to-period style
would make for an interesting angle, and might encourage viewers to
look into some Noir classics.
Mother 3 (2006,
Nintendo)
Who would direct it?: Chris
Butler (ParaNorman, Coraline)
The Mother series is known for
its cute and colourful settings, with a darker horrifying plot
underneath. That kind of setup just begs to be told in a twee
stop-motion format (without Tim Burton, preferably).
Mother 3 in particular is a
great tale experienced by few, and a surprisingly sad and moving one
at that. Having recently watched ParaNorman, the team behind
that would do incredible justice to such a project. Just... Don't let
very young children watch - they may be permanently scarred.
Keep them on the game
console
Mass Effect series
(2007-2012, Bioware)
Mass Effect's charm really isn't in its
world-building. What the games did well was making that world feel
relevant to the player - a range of choices in character design,
dialogue options, good/evil dichotomies, and so on. A film (being a
linear narrative) has to choose a single story path - so writers of a
Mass Effect movie would have to try and encompass a
representative telling of the games with a single continuity - and
that just ain't happening.
The series' huge backstory also puts it
in a position similar to the lacklustre Watchmen. A fine line
stands between drowning newcomers in lore, and not having enough
in-jokes for the diehard fans. Failure results in a hot mess. Mass
Effect would likely suffer even worse - fans are going to take
every difference between the film and their own personal experience
on board.
Uncharted series
(2007-2011, Naughty Dog)
Uncharted is already 90% film.
The set pieces in the series are grand and dramatic, but the best
moments are where you have control during the death-defying parts -
the possibility that you could mess up and leave Nathan Drake to
perish. Just watching the same scene (without the uncertainty of
survival, no less) voids that tension.
Aside from that, the actual events in
the Uncharted games are pressingly generic in action films.
We've had decades of ruins exploration, shoot-outs against Russians
and snappy one-liners - Drake as a character can't offer anything new
to that formula.
Heavy Rain (2010,
Quantic Dream)
Heavy Rain is, in a way, a film
rendered as a video game. The director, David Cage, has gone on
record many times saying that the future of games is to make them
more like films, and has yet to prove himself correct.
The game's cinematography is definitely
first class, but little else is. Heavy Rain's story is unique
for a game, but dire for a film. Character motivations are all over
the place, and the character plot threads are hastily stitched
together. An adaptation would have to fix so much to make things
competent, it may as well be a different story.
Final Notes
Video game stories are generally
unambitious and often pandering, but a common complaint levelled at
film adaptations (and this holds true for films adapted from other
kinds of media) is that the narrative strays too far from the
original work. The long-term fans want to see their darlings in a 1:1
translation, and won't stand for less.
The best film adaptations that I've
seen don't take the source's story verbatim, but instead understand
the feel of the original. The Street Fighter movie
isn't great, but it's an adaptation that definitely captures the
goofy nature of Street Fighter, even if the character roles
and actor choices are unorthodox.
If game-to-film adaptations are to
succeed, the games with a strong theme, easily understood context,
and with room for reinterpretation are key. Just taking what sells
well isn't going to cut it.
Then again, since when were adaptations
about artistic integrity?
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